Bunnies and Bears

Happy + Thoughts = Optimism

Hunt and other Stories

  • Scott won the Morgan Prize. And so, for the first time since we stopped dating, he flew out to California for a couple weeks. He didn't stay with me - I offered, but I think he suspected it awkward, or at least inconvenient. Still, I cleaned my house and had him for dinner, took him to a bookstore, bubble tea, and pho, and otherwise hosted, entertained, and talked to him. It was lovely and painful and comfortable and sad. We ate french toast with hot tea and Bach, and the weather was moderate and slightly sunny. Everything is always the same, except when it's not.
  • I went hiking at the Windy Hill Open Space Preserve with a coworker, his girlfriend, and a friend of his that he was trying to introduce me to. His girlfriend turned out to not be much of a hiker, which almost seemed like a ploy to separate us into two groups of two, but I think that really she just struggled with keeping pace for six miles. Afterwards, we test drove the Solar Car of the Stanford Solar Car team (as both my coworker and his friend were/are heavily involved with the team), which was officially my first time driving any kind of electric car. New experiences for the win! We finished the evening with bubble tea, Taiwanese food, and what is perhaps the most fabulous bookstore I have ever been to.
  • I ordered and received a new swimsuit and waterproof mp3 playing stuffs. I find the earbuds somewhat uncomfortable, with a number of the same problems as ear plugs (uncomfortable, amplify the sounds of your own movements, amplify the sounds of your own movements...), but music when swimming is somewhat novel and rather helpful for synchro.
  • And then, in less than a week, it was Martin Luther King Junior weekend. In other words, time for Mystery Hunt. I decided to fly in to Boston for it this round, which made for a particularly hectic and sleep-deprived hunt.
    • We flew in on a red-eye Thursday night, and arrived Friday morning totally exhausted. I crashed immediately, decided that kick-off wasn't worth getting up for, and didn't actually get started and involved in puzzles for a good while.
    • The first puzzle that I really worked on was Banner Headline. It was a giant word search...of doom. Suffice it to say that it wasn't solved by our team until late Saturday, and that the solution was obtained substantially through backsolving from the meta. 
    • uh... in fact, i worked on a lot of puzzles with quite a bit of stuck-ness: Planar Complex, Close Encounter Clockwise, Bits and Pieces (somewhat)...
    • Cute puzzles: Bits and Pieces was a puzzle with a bunch of obscure board game pieces to be identified. The Arena was an awesome 3-d knight's move boggle with words clued by crossword style clues. Building a Mystery was a pretty cool puzzle involving piecing together a truncated cubeoctahedron.
    • Looking back through the puzzles, there appear to be a bunch of rather interesting puzzles that I didn't get to look at =/
    • Hunt was won by Metaphysical Plant - basically the Random Hall alum team far too early on Sunday morning. It's always a bit disappointing to wake up and discover that hunt has been silently finished while you were asleep
  • Other stuff
  • I managed to catch a cold at hunt, which was a bit unpleasant. Despite the cold, I dragged myself in the Rain down to SF by Caltrain to watch the Cirque du Soleil show, Ovo. I forgot my ear plugs, but was thankfully given a pair by the nice couple behind me. The show was excellent. It was fairly cute and had a nice selection of acts. The slackline act was particularly astounding, in my opinion. I have a slight preference for contortion/handbalancing/static aerial acts over object manipulation/tumbling/flying aerial acts, and it happened to be the case that this particular show did also. 
  • On Sunday, I joined some friends at the Stanford Solar Car shop to build a kite. We built a pretty big kite. It might work, but it was too dark/rainy to test fly it by the time that we finished. And then...
  • On Monday I was pretty much over the cold, so I went to the climbing gym with my brother. Where I promptly got the worst ankle sprain that I have ever had by falling off the bouldering wall about 8 feet off the ground onto the *edge* of a mat (landing directly on the mat or just on the floor i would have been fine). I have been mostly hobbling around with crutches since then. I tried to get off the crutches over the weekend and it seems to have gotten notably worse. It still hurts now. And I am on ibuprofen. And I have had this sprain for a week.
  • In the meantime, one of my cousins was visiting the area from Taiwan for some conference. We took him out to a basketball game at Oracle Arena, which involved getting there rather late, hopping/crawling up the ridiculously large number of stairs required to get to the stadium,  applying earplugs, and tying a rather nice knot. I think our team lost by about 20 points, but I'm not certain. In fact, I'm not even sure who was playing...
  • We also took him out to a nice/expensive dinner at Zuni on Thursday where we ordered their famous chicken dish that takes an hour to prepare. 

In the meantime, I have read some papers and tied some knots. I have been very happy and very sad and somewhat sick. I have looked at the present and promised myself that my life is my own and my dreams are the future. And it has rained. 

Accomplishments for 2010

24 hours in, I have:

  • danced
  • wished people happy new year (incidentally, Happy New Year All!)
  • made a lantern-thing from test tubes, wire, and crochet thread
  • added purple flame liquid to said lantern and observed pretty purple flame
  • cleaned house (quite a bit of it)
  • obtained more furniture
  • sorted pictures
  • made journal entries and posted pictures
  • obtained a Quiddler deck and a Murder Mystery Jigsaw puzzle set
  • had a lovely dinner with candles and such
  • (re)watched some of Initial D
  • played the piano
  • read The Book of Story Beginnings
  • successfully tied a pan chang knot for the first time
  • talked to a friend
  • various other activities
  • slept
and now I shall sleep again. May the coming year be lovely, fruitful, and better than the last.

Taiwan 4

Distressingly, jetlag continues to not be my friend.

On Monday, we headed out in the direction of the Sihcao Wetlands, home of many exciting and bizarre wildlifes - mangroves, funny fish that flop out onto the land, many kinds of crabs, birds... We skipped the mangrove forest boat tour* (since most of us had been on it previously) and went questing, instead for the black-faced spoonbill (which none of us had seen before). After a bit of additional driving on a road that went from being a large thoroughfare to a small dirt road and back to being a large thoroughfare, we somehow managed to successfully find a bird watching platform where a bunch of people were hanging out taking turns looking at a flock of spoonbills (plus intermittent other birds) through a conveniently set up telescope.

Tuesday morning we got up early and went to the Tainan City park (one random photo of it I found online) where apparently large groups of people regularly get together to engage in various drop in exercise classes - Tai Chi, dancing, other form of dancing, other other form of dancing, martial art, other form of martial art, weird exercises 1, 2, 3...n, etc. There are also large walking paths and such around the park. None of the classes seemed particularly interesting to me, although we had come mostly so that my aunt could attend the Tai Chi class, but towards the end we managed to stumble across a ballroom dance group that my parents joined for a few dances.

The rest of our time in Tainan was spent shopping and visiting night markets and such. We returned to Taipei on Thursday night.

On Friday, we went to see the Yehliu Geopark which is full of ridiculous rock structures apparently known as Hoodoo. The fact that these rock structures are found along the coast is apparently rather unusual. Afterwards, we went and spent several hours hanging out at a hot spring resort. The resort had a variety of different pools being kept at a variety of different temperatures, some with water jets, some bigger, some smaller, some shallow with bumpy rock bottoms, some made from wood. There were hot pools with sulfurous water at around 37, 40, and 42 degrees and cool spring water pools at around 23. We stayed mostly in the co-ed swimsuit required area, although, for the sake of experience I made a brief side trip to the women's only nude hot spring. I re-observed that I have the highest temperature tolerance in my family.

In the evening, we stopped by Chia Te to pick up 鳳梨酥 (pineapple pastries). This place is supposedly "the best" in Taiwan for pineapple pastry, which, given that this is something of a uniquely Taiwanese pastry, suggests that it's quite good, something that most people seem to agree on. After a rushed dinner, we hurried off to the airport to catch the plane for the return trip. Our gate, c4, turned out to be adjacent to the Hello Kitty gate (c3), which, I suppose is not quite as awesome as it *being* the Hello Kitty terminal, but was still pretty cute (and, since we weren't going to Japan, no Hello Kitty plane for us).

(Interesting bonus, because of the time zone change we arrived in CA "before" we left Taiwan - the flight was 11 hours long and Taiwan is 16 hours ahead)

And now I am back in the states, failing to recover from jetlag quickly.

*we still saw a bunch of mangrove trees, they are pretty all over the place there

Taiwan 3

jetlag is not my friend.

Got back on Friday night and have been coping with jetlag since with the aid of sugars and tisanes. Actually, I have no idea if those help at all, but they basically describe most of my recent food consumption. I am not sure what it means that I have just automatically decomposed tisane into tea sin, which i suppose is the same as eat sin and ate sin and would make tisanes be tea sins or sin teas? hrm...

So...Taiwan.

Beginning where I last left off:

On Friday, we went to the temple to do wedding related stuff. It was somewhat interesting and much longer than anything similar that I have seen before. They set up a bunch of food and such at the main altar and my uncle had to do baibai and offer flowers and then serve tea (or alcohol?) in a bunch of little cups that had been set out and then there was this long baibai sequence with everybody having three sticks of incense (later put in the appropriate spot) and some guy from the temple reading a bunch of stuff in Taiwanese and directing. After that everyone got an entire packet of incense and we went upstairs where there were a ton of smaller altars that you went to and did baibai at in order and then placed three sticks of incense at each and then back downstairs where there where there were even more smaller altars, until finally at the end you ran out of incense. Then we waited around for a while. Then the long baibai sequence was repeated a bit shorter and my uncle added more liquid to the cups. Then we waited around some more. Finally the long baibai sequence was repeated a third time, we burned a ridiculous quantity of paper money, and we packed up and went home.

On Saturday, the house totally filled up with people as all of my cousins in Taipei came down for the wedding and other relatives from all over showed up. The day was mostly spent cooking and decorating. My mother's cousin directed the cooking and we somehow managed to create a ridiculously large meal for 40 relatives or so who stopped by for dinner, as well as a pretty reasonable lunch. The family idol (which I had never heard of before) showed up and got a makeshift altar set up. From this I discovered that there exists such a thing as 24 hour incense. In the middle of the day, my cousins and I went sightseeing to the Anping Tree House, which is not so much  "treehouse" the way you usually think of one as a house that was eaten by a tree. We finished up the decorating by putting double love stickers all over the place on all the doors. Apparently the refrigerator door qualifies as a door for this purpose. I kept ripping my stickers.

Sunday was the day of the wedding and apparently some fortune teller had declared that 10am was the time that they needed to be in the bedroom. So, fairly early in the morning, my uncle and a small entourage set out in a couple of red ribbon bedecked cars to go pick up the bride to the sound of some rather loud firecrackers. I'm told that there was some ritual done at her family's place to do with letting a daughter go, but I wasn't there, so I can't speak to it.

When the cars arrived back at our house, what quickly became evident was that nobody knew what they were doing except maybe the photographer, and my dad thinks he was just pretending so that we would actually get on with it. Somehow I got turned into the one offering oranges to the bride when she exited the car (my brother opened the door - originally he was supposed to give the oranges, but he didn't wake up early enough). It is apparently supposed to be a kid that does this, but all of the cousins are pretty much adults by now. It took three or four tries of them opening and closing the door before they got this right, and, as best I could tell, in the end, all it really was was a photo-op. And I got a red envelope for it, which pretty much means that I made money going to the wedding.

My aunt (the matchmaker - apparently all weddings have one) may have said something in Taiwanese at this point. Or not. In any case, I think my uncle carried his fiance over the threshold (with some help to make sure that her dress didn't get into the red pot of burning coals in the middle), at which point, "yay. he has stolen her away from her family and into our family's house so now they are married or something".

Then we all stood around trying to figure out whether we went to the room next or did baibai next. Also, wait, when do we do the thing with the tang yuan? The photographer declared that we did the room next so after some hustling with trying to figure out who took the elevator and who took the stairs we made it up to the bridal suite where there were a bunch of photographs. A lot of stuff got brought in to the room from the car at this point, I think mostly traditional gifts from the brides family or something. At least, I'm hoping that the red washbasin and washboard with double love symbols were some kind of traditional thing and not that there were people really expecting a ton of handwashing to happen.

Then we all stood around trying to figure out what happened next. The photographer declared that it was the tang yuan, so my aunt went down and got a couple bowls of it to serve to the newlyweds and said some more stuff in Taiwanese. Yay, more photo-ops. Next up was supposed to be the baibai, but we needed my grandmother for that, and it seemed that she wasn't really up and about yet.

Then we all stood around waiting for her and wondering whether we were supposed to go to the altar with the family idol first (on the first floor) or the altar for my grandfather (on the seventh floor). First floor first, apparently. My grandmother did baibai, and then the newly weds followed suit and my aunt said some more stuff in Taiwanese. Lastly, we all ran up (or took the elevator) to the seventh floor, where something similar was repeated to let my grandfather know about the wedding.

Afterwards, we all sat around waiting for the big banquet dinner. and sat around. and had a special traditional noodle soup for lunch. and sat around. and played pool on the sixth floor. and sat around. and did some sudoku. and played ping pong on the sixth floor. and failed at knowing any of the songs on the karaoke machine on the second floor. (have I mentioned that my grandmother's house is huge?) and sat around. and took a nap. and yay! big banquet dinner where you meet a bunch of relatives you didn't even know that you had. Seriously, somehow I had totally missed that my grandmother has a sister.

Ok. That was long enough, so I'm going to break off all of the post wedding stuff into yet another post. But y'all can call me now since I'm no longer in Taiwan.

Taiwan 2

So, on Sunday, as predicted, we visited Taipei 101. Possibly the coolest part was the elevator, which travels pretty ridiculously fast (16.83 m/s, 55.22 ft/s, 60.6 km/h, 37.7 mi/h). Someone took a video. You can also see the tuned mass damper and a video of the shiny fireworks show that they put on for New Year's. The mass damper didn't move visibly while I was there, but, yes, there is video of it moving available online also. I took pictures, but haven't managed to retrieve them off of my camera yet, and, for that matter, it's not clear to me that there are any more exciting than what you can already find online.

The rest of the day was consumed with trying out the subway system and wandering about various markets. We saw a bit of the nifty night lighting on the skyscrapers at one point as well.

I am reminded again of how awful the drivers are in Taiwan (also a notably bad driver, the little boy's mother in Ponyo). It's basically very unusual for anyone to wear a seatbelt in the back seat also - to the extent that many cars have the seatbelts inaccessible and/or removed. When I was a kid, wearing a seatbelt in the front seat was also not-done, but I think they've passed a law about it or something, since then. Driver's here regularly drive in things that aren't lanes, swerving around to get past slower traffic, speed aggregiously, ignore a large variety of traffic rules, and, most notably, in the case of one taxi we took, watch television while doing so.

On Monday we took the high speed rail to a bus to a taxi to my grandmother's house in Tainan. The high speed rail doesn't really look like much, but does go very smoothly, quickly, and directly (through mountains as necessary) to its destinations, although the destinations tend to be a bit outside of the cities.

In Tainan, the predominant language is Taiwanese (in contrast, in Taipei the predominant language is Mandarin). Since, as mentioned previoiusly, I understand almost no Taiwanese, this means that I find Tainan a bit more difficult to navigate. People do learn Mandarin in schools, so pretty much anyone in the younger generation will speak Mandarin, but a good number of people in my grandmother's generation don't speak Mandarin at all (but may speak Japanese).

I haven't done much in Tainan other than work from home (and eat food =P). I don't really have enough vacation time for this trip, so I need to work from home at least a little bit. The goal is to get all/most of the working from home done before the wedding.

Taiwan

My uncle (mother's younger brother) is getting married, so I'm spending the next ~ two weeks in Taiwan. I haven't been here in about 6 years, so it's a little strange.

We left Thursday on a direct flight from EVA Air. This was my first time flying directly to Taiwan.

The flight was surprisingly good. Although, my brother was unimpressed by the "not remotely top of the line" in-flight entertainment, I found being able to select your movies and TV programs and play games (even against other passengers) and such on your personal screen pretty novel still. We've always flown on Northwest which is stuck in the far past, apparently. I watched Vitus, played some games, and read some papers.
Arrived Friday night, went to my mother's older brother's place, pretty much fell asleep immediately.

Saturday we went swimming and to the "spa" (apparently a big pool with various water jets in different configurations, some hot tubs, and a steam room). Afterwards, breakfast and to Costco. John got contacts and I picked up Ponyo and a selection of six Harry Potter movies. 

Afterwards, we visit some cousins and my mom's sister at/near National Taiwan University. This is my mother's alma mater. My youngest cousin is currently a student, and her brother recently graduated. It's kind of surreal to me how much older everybody is now, my youngest cousin, in particular, doesn't look anything like what I remember. The cousins have all learned English now, and especially since my father (who doesn't speak Chinese) is here, the language being spoken is a haphazard combination of Chinese, English, and sometimes Taiwanese (which I don't understand).

In the evening we went to this ridiculously fancy and expensive Japanese restaurant. The meal was ~60-70 dollars US a person. Bearing in mind that food here is *cheap*, probably about half as expensive as it would be in the US at least. I was pretty full after the 6th course and somehow there were still another 5 courses to stumble through. 

This morning, after giving up on sleeping (blah jetlag), I watched Ponyo. First silently with English subtitles (didn't want to wake people up) and later with the Chinese dub and Chinese subtitles. It's mostly fairly simple language in it, so I might have been able to watch it silently with Chinese subtitles, but it's still somewhat unlikely. It's cute.

Plans for the day are unclear - Taipei 101 followed by...something. Subway tour. Taipei 101 is way taller than the rest of the city. It makes the other skyscrapers look diminutive. Later in the week we will head to my grandmother's place in Tainan, perhaps by the High Speed Rail. Taipei 101 and the High Speed Rail didn't exist last time I was here - there has been a grand infrastructure explosion or something recently.

I forgot my camera yesterday, but perhaps I'll have a chance to take pictures today.

Yet Another List

  • My mint plant fell two floors off of my balcony, so I brought it to work where it has been shedding leaves at a rather astonishing rate (although the remaining plant, though smaller and sparser looks relatively happy). I had assumed that this was due to the plant not likely the fluorescent light as much as a real sun (sorry plant, I like the sun too, but my cubicle doesn't come with it), but today noticed that it seems to have a multitude of small green insects all over the stems. My assessment is - aphids. This seems rather poor. I removed a large number of them with a tissue, and am somewhat concerned that I may actually turn out to be so bad at gardening as to kill a mint plant. And, really, mint plants are nearly impossible to kill. Probably it will still do better outside. I'm guessing that the little insects might at least have to deal with cold/predators there. So will the plant, of course, but mints are perennials. And really hard to kill...right? OTOH, in it's current location there's not much chance of any other plants getting infestations...
  • Incidental, random aphid fact from wikipedia: "Some aphids have telescoping generations. That is, the parthenogenetic, viviparous female has a daughter within her, who is already parthenogenetically producing her own daughter." That is to say, "they're born pregnant".
  • It seems that nobody bothered/was interested/noticed* in the totally trivial puzzle embedded in my last post, so I won't bother coming up with something more interesting/complicated here. 
  • I suppose that makes sense given the expected number of readers for any given post in this journal.
  • Pictures from PCOC (the origami convention) are starting to come in. See some here.  Some of them even have me in them. :)
  • When I start getting wrist pain from computering and such (something alleviated substantially recently by the switch from a mouse to a trackball), I have a tendency to bite my wrists, something that I insist does not qualify as self injury. That said, the other day I noticed I was doing so before lunch and wrapped my wrist to prevent myself from doing it further. The red marks were still very visible at 10 that evening after I had both swum (exercising regularly does more to alleviate this kind of pain than anything else, in my experience) and showered. I'm not sure what this tells us. 
  • Losing hair ties I understand. Hair ties are small. I'm a bit more baffled by my ability to lose headbands.
  • and now i'm back, but the sun still comes up. the ceiling fell on my head. a molten gooey lollipop, the rest of the kindred. and on and on we go again, I don't know why. and zed. the secrets are, "I cannot tell" "we lie upon the bed" You promised me you'd take me now I feel that I've been led. if up and down then round and round. a purple crayon. so qued.
  • I'm not sure how long I'm going to be able to keep up this bullet-point posting thing. There aren't always a sufficient number of interesting things that I want to post about publicly.
  • If you've made it this far - let me know if you have any recommendations for: things I should do in the bay area. things I should do in general. knots to learn.
* I'm guessing it was that nobody noticed

And thick and fast they came at last, And more, and more, and more

Since it seems that the number of people that reads these lists is just about equal to one

  • unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
  • On Elevators
    • Every day as I take the elevator at work I try and guess which people will get off at each floor
    • Sometimes I try to figure out what algorithm the elevators use (there are six of them). I am not sure how easy this is to accomplish with the behavior I am able to observe - elevator stopping patterns at a floor that I am at and elevator movement of an elevator that i am on (which is to say I am guessing it's not really possible). I am somewhat concerned that they may all be using their own copy of the standard algorithm for one elevator (go up while there are up requests, fetching them as you pass them and dropping them off. When there are no more up requests go to the top-most down request and go down fetching and dropping of the down requests in order. repeat) without communicating with each other. Although, I think I only see two elevators stopped at the same time going the same way on the first floor. On the other hand, not that many people get on the elevator at other floors, comparatively. In any case, given the information I am able to observe, it is likely not possible for me to disprove that they are using that algorithm... 
    • How public, like a frog
    • Sometimes I try to figure out whether putting signs in the elevators requesting that people able to use the stairs only get on and off the elevator at odd numbered floors would have any noticeable effect on energy consumption. 
    • Sometimes I walk up the stairs, but you can't get onto the stairs from the first floor of my building, so I have to take the elevator to the second floor and then walk up, which is just annoying since I am *already* on the elevator
    • A lizard named Ed is asleep in his bed,
    • Sometimes the buttons people press on the elevator form a pretty pattern and I feel obligated to select a floor that will complete it, rather than my own floor (I am still waiting for the pressed buttons to be 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13)... and then I just look at the pattern being really happy about there being a pretty pattern... :)
  • Till the stars had run away, And the shadows eaten the moon.
  • It is actually somewhat surprising to me how few people read this journal. Sort of makes me want to post more to observe this effect in greater detail. I am not sure this is how it's supposed to work.
  • I took the elevator, Sixteen floors above the ground.
  • Relatedly, I have a friend in Boston that I often talk to when I visit there. Each visit, this person comments that perhaps I would be less lonely in CA if people in MA kept in contact with me more (or something along those lines). In any case, the main point of the comment is to make the statement that they will "call/email/skype me or something". I am totally fascinated by the degree to which this does not happen despite it basically having been promised on several occasions. I am not sure whether fascinated amusement is quite the correct response. Perhaps annoyance would make more sense. But it's such an interesting phenomena. Why say that you will do 'X' if you won't? Is the intention always to do 'X' but then forgotten? Does this person struggle with communicating with people not "on-site" in general? Perhaps just to be confusing? Perhaps, despite the impression of the conversation, I am supposed to be initiating contact? mm... life is full of puzzling things
  • Such as the Enigma that I got earlier this week and haven't looked at yet.
  • The moon, though slight, was moon enough to show
  • I am pretty sure I've owned both the shirt I'm currently wearing and the pants since I was in middle school. This qualifies as yet another amusement in my book. I do wonder why I spend so much time contemplating the logic of these rather mundane things. Surely I can find more productive things to spend my thought on. 
  • Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
It is astounding to me that digitabulist is a real word and that it's meaning is so apparently random.

My life in stereo: in which I further demonstrate that I like lists

  • Went to a coworker's house nov. 5 to watch V for Vendetta. They have cats. I am allergic to cats. This seems to have happened at many different places recently.
  • Pacific Coast Origami Convention happened over the weekend. 
    • I hung out with people 
    • "competed" in the "after-dinner entertainment" competition (by invitation only), which consisted of folding a toilet seat cover* (I "folded" an orchid, other notable entries include a toilet, a man to sit on the toilet, and a stall) and an envelope (I folded a penguin, other notable entries include a mailbox and a man sitting on a toilet). 
    • For this I got a free sheet of origamido paper** (I chose blue because it was pretty even though there aren't too many things you can fold that are blue). 
    • I also picked up some nifty folded decorative centerpiece lamps from the dinner. 
    • I am so certain that other people will post their own exhibit photos online that I didn't bother to take any. 
    • My favorite model that I folded the whole weekend was Jared Needle's "Bear 2", his display model can be seen here. I really didn't fold as much as I have at previous conventions, though.
    • Robert Lang, whom everyone was rather jovially referring to as "Bobby J" for some reason (the impression is that he doesn't particularly like the nickname) had a bunch of models in the exhibit that looked like strips of paper woven together in interesting ways. These were created by folding non-square sheets of paper with the aid of a laser cutting to avoid the need for excessive paper creasing. Brian added a model to his exhibit that actually consisted of cut and woven sheets of paper with flavor text that said something along the lines of "folded from one square with no laser computer". It was pretty excellent.
  • Been tying lots of knots. no really - lots. Finally just went ahead and bought some more rope online so that I can stop having to untie them all of the time in order to tie new ones. Rope comes in pretty colors, so I am happy.
  • California continues. It remains less awesome than Boston. well. Scott and I broke up, but relationships are too complex and personal to describe in a blog, so this is all you get: Distance is the suck.
  • The California Academy of Science apparently runs a nightclub on Thursday nights. Science Museum + dj's and dancing + alcohol + science lectures + planetarium shows = what? 
  • I haven't been to the nightlife thing, but I have been to the CalAcademy multiple times. Also
    • the Exploratorium, 
    • the Monterey Bay Aquarium (twice), 
    • climbing and camping at Castle Rock (on different occasions), 
    • Point Reyes National Park, Boston (some number of times), 
    • the Maker Faire, 
    • the San Mateo County Fair (actually pretty excellent, and has rides!), 
    • California's Great America amusement park***, 
    • the de Young museum, 
    • a giants game (where I got an awesome free hat), 
    • and I'm sure various other places I'm not thinking of since I moved out to California.
  • Going to Taiwan for my Uncle's wedding at the end of the month. Haven't been there in something like 6 years and need to brush up on my Chinese rather badly.
  • Somewhat distressingly struck by the observation that we're all getting older all the time
  • Eleanor took a picture of my hair after I crown braided it at Stanford Splash. It looks better than I expected.
  • Speaking of which, I taught a class on giant origami for Splash. It ended up going quite a bit over and had more than it's share of student drama, but we did end up successfully completing a couple of Yodas out of 9 ft. squares of paper. Pictures of Yoda and Splash in general can be found here. My hair is still in a crown braid for most of these pictures although it is probably getting progressively messier.

* This was actually fairly impossible to truly "fold". Most entries were mostly just crumpled into some reasonable shape. Specifications included "no wet folding".
** This is a pretty amazing prize. Origamido paper is currently going for no less than $10 a sheet. See Robert Lang's blurb on it below:

Origamido Paper
I have, naturally, saved the best for last. Without question, the best thin paper for origami in the entire world comes from Haverhill, Massachusetts, from the Origamido Studio, home base of Michael LaFosse. Michael is well-known as one of the world's great origami masters. But he is also a master paper-maker, and over the years has developed recipes and techniques for making paper for origami that is thin, strong, crisp, takes a crease, and isn't overly weakened by folding; in short, it's as close to perfection as I've ever seen. Michael primarily makes paper for his own works, but a couple of times a year, he makes paper available for sale to the rest of us. It's only in stock occasionally—and when it is, the world's origami artists fairly quickly buy him out—but if you're serious about folding complex figures, hie yourself over to Origamido, and try folding the very best. All the papers are pH-balanced. Even more important, the colors come from mineral pigments rather than (potentially unstable) dyes. This paper will last a lifetime.
*** This was fairly excellent as we went to the park quite close to the end of the season and much of the merchandise was selling for $1 as they were trying to sell it before the season ended. Particularly the Nickelodeon stuff as their contract with Nickelodeon expires this year and they are not renewing it. Also there weren't many lines (for the same reason).